TAM Group Z (Katie, Nese, Rania, Ruirui) Response to Keyword Lecture by Janelle

TAM Group Z –Katie, Nese, Rania, Ruirui

In the second day of the induction week, in her Keyword Lecture Janelle Reinelt dealt with the “macro-terms” of our programme: globalization, internationalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. She explained why the name of our MA journey in the three countries, four cities, in a vaste area of theory/practice/research is called International Performance Research and not Globalization and Performance Research or any other name.

As an exercise, we would like to suggest an alternative to what M-A-I-P-R stands for: Multicultural Analysis of International Performance Research.
As group Z, we thought that these concepts still take as their starting point the idea of an entity called “nation”. Not to refute today’s lecture but with the hope of enriching it, we would like to add the term “multiculturalism” and its problematics to our discussion.

There is a great deal of literature around the meaning and the political implications of the term multiculturalism. To take a basic quote from Asu Aksoy’s lectures in Bilgi University, multiculturalism is the awareness of the heterogeneity within the previously homogenously imagined nation/communities. This awareness is marked by a reification of difference and claims to rights and entitlements based on the unique status of that identity/experience of communities that mobilize within and across national borders. While the 1960’s mobilization of black citizens can be considered an instance of multiculturalism –claim to citizenship rights within the national borders of USA, the term can also stand for Turkish Gay and Lesbian Community mobilizing itself within Turkey, among diaspora in Germany and getting support/sharing a larger community-agenda with the world LGBTT movements while at the same time being part of the fight against patriarchy along the various feminist struggles.

One of the critiques of multiculturalism related to demanding group rights on the basis of a uniquely shared difference is that it continues to reify that category and ensure the continuity of any discrimination based on that category. On the other hand, the term multiculturalism can be taken in a broader sense. We propose that multiculturalism is inherent in every member of any category. One can detect the potential for flexible transversal politics that mobilize not around a fixed category of being/doing –an identity- but around a cause. As a woman, one can choose to be a conscientious objector against a militaristic regime -even though women are not obliged to do their military service in that given nation, and ally with the other women and men who are in favor of antimilitarist policies and against military service. On the other hand, she can ally herself with women against a group of men on the basis of her feminism and even against some groups of women on the basis of her sexual orientation.

To illustrate the point, we started the journey here based on the terms Janelle presented:


And here is what we suggest based on our discussion on multiculturalism:



We would have preferred to come up with a three dimensional matrix with different shapes in a variety of colors. The figure, ideally, would be so-encompassing that while the same color would signify a particular group, the difference in the tones of a particular color would signal to the differences among the members of that group, yet still account for the possible social/political/cultural alliances that they (could) have.

While as MAIPR “people”, we mobilize outside of our country and come together for a cause related to “performance” that apparently we are not even able to define collectively; some other groups in the world mobilize transnationally based on their sexual orientation under the international discourse of Human Rights and in cosmopolitan ways.